Plex really wants you to subscribe monthly. That’s the charitable read of the company’s announcement today that the Lifetime Plex Pass is jumping from $249.99 to $749.99 on July 1, 2026, a 200% increase that follows a previous hike from $119.99 to $249.99 just over a year ago. In the span of roughly 14 months, the lifetime cost has gone from $120 to $750. That’s also 10 times more than what I paid for it back in 2014.
In its official blog post, Plex says the new price “reflects the real, ongoing value of the software,” acknowledges it considered eliminating the lifetime option entirely, and frames recurring subscriptions as more sustainable for long-term development. Existing Lifetime Plex Pass holders are unaffected and keep all current benefits. Monthly ($6.99) and annual ($69.99) Plex Pass pricing is also staying put. The company did announce a roadmap of coming improvements alongside the price increase, including automatic episode downloads, playlist editing in mobile apps, and restored music and photo library support in TV apps. At the current $69.99/year rate, you’d need to subscribe for nearly 11 years to reach the new lifetime cost.
Plex also introduced the Remote Watch Pass tier last year, requiring a separate subscription for remote streaming of personal libraries on certain platforms. That earlier change quietly made Plex more expensive for a segment of its user base before this week’s announcement.
There are users in this community who run Plex servers and have been doing so happily for years. For them, the window to lock in the current $249.99 lifetime rate closes June 30 at 8:01 PM ET. Whether that price still represents good value depends entirely on how long you plan to keep running Plex, and whether you believe the platform will still exist and remain useful a decade from now. The existence of serious open-source alternatives like Jellyfin is worth mentioning, as it’s functionally similar and entirely free. Plex’s value over Jellyfin is largely in its polish, its hardware support, and its integrated streaming catalog — and whether that justifies $750 upfront is a fair question. If you were planning to buy a lifetime pass at some point, now is functionally your last chance at the old price.
Discussion (12 replies)
Join Discussion →So glad I got mine years ago when it was like $100 or so.
Just waiting for them to start offering things I want that aren't available to the Lifetime Pass before I move to something else.
Guess they needed big one time cash infusions early on in their lifecycle and now there is no income to sustain them given Plex servers cater to a very specific and limited market.
Guess Plex users will find out how "lifetime" subs actually work pretty soon here.
Almost got into Plex but since it can't do uncompressed A/V streams w/o some kind of processing it didn't fit my needs. I was only just recently able to complete my poor mans NAS setup in connecting 18 TB and 24 TB drives to my router and have Kodi throughout the house.
Literally able to stream 4K disc files throughout the house including their original Dolby Vision/Atmos streams. It took some effort but our entire 20+ years of dvd/blu-ray/4k library/etc., are on it and things are awesome now and no paid services needed to do it. Our LG OLEDs builtin media player app supports Samba and is able to access a lot of these files as well (up to the cap of what the router supports).
hahahahahahaha
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What is it that you get with 750$ anyway? (Besides a front end to your own library)
In any case i dont have any ' collection' of videos or anything to self stream so yea Im not their target anyway.
I'd say a Plex license is worth maybe $75-120.
If you hadn't bought at that price or less you should simply move on to the future, Jellyfin.
Or if you don't even need to share with people beyond your local network there are a dozen simpler solutions.
Your network, your bandwith, our money?
I never understood what are you exactly paying for with plex? It's a media server app, it serves your content, not theirs, right? So what is the pass for?
Their software. Many people pay for software. It almost made sense. It was pretty slick automatic matcher and web sharing software that only one person in a friend/family group needed.
But now they really want monthly payments. And the software isn't useful enough, IMO, to justify that.
They were trying to integrate external sources as well, and be sort of streaming hub, but that didn't work out for them at all. Then they went and locked external streaming behind the paywall, and that's pretty much where I thought they could get bent.
External streaming meaning streaming from a remote location, or streaming netflix or prime through your plex server?
External sources - Netflix, Amazon, Tubi, etc. It was basically just a wrapper around your subscriptions, like Roku/Fire/AppleTV do, only they charged an additional sub for it. I think they were trying to work deals with the streamers to include their subs in with the Plex sub, and their inability to do that is what finally killed it.
External streaming - streaming your content from a remote location (without needing to VPN into your home network)